The results of the 29 May 2024 elections caused a seismic shift in South Africa’s political landscape. For the first time in three decades of democracy, the ruling ANC did not emerge with a majority.With a constitutional deadline of just fourteen days to elect a president, the nation held its breath. Would the ANC forge a so-called doomsday coalition with the EFF and Patriotic Alliance, or a centrist partnership with its nemesis, the DA? What role would smaller parties play, and ho...

UPDATED EDITIONWith corruption and fraud endemic in democratic South Africa, whistleblowers have provided an invaluable service to society through disclosures about cover-ups, malfeasance and wrongdoing. Their courageous acts have resulted in the recovery of millions of rands to the fiscus and to their fellow citizens as well as in improved transparency and accountability.But in most cases, the outcomes for the whistleblowers themselves are devastating. Som...

As a young, soccer-mad boy living in rural KwaZulu-Natal, Robert Marawa listened to the commentary of local football derbies on a small, crackling FM radio. As a teenager, he spent hours practising his presenting skills on his family’s home video recorder, reading from newspaper clippings his mother had carefully kept for him while he was at boarding school in Hilton. Marawa’s dream was to be a sportscaster who would be beamed into the homes of South Africa’s footballing fans.Rober...

An authoritative account of the crimes of Oscar Pistorius, the beloved Paralympic superstar who shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in cold blood.At 08:03 on the morning of Valentine's Day 2013, news broke that Oscar Pistorius, the Paralympic superstar known as the "Blade Runner," had shot and killed his girlfriend at his luxury home in Pretoria, South Africa. Within minutes, the story reverberated around the world as banners flashed across television screens bro...

In September 2005 one of South Africa’s most eminent mining magnates and businessmen Brett Kebble was killed on a quiet suburban street in Johannesburg. The investigation into the case was a tipping point for democratic South Africa. The top-level investigation that followed exposed the corrupt relationship between the country’s Chief of Police and Interpol President Jackie Selebi and suave Mafioso Glenn Agliotti. A lawless Johannesburg underbelly was exposed – dominated by drug lords, ste...

In September 2005, corporate South Africa was rocked by the violent murder of mining maverick Brett Kebble. In life, he was known as a billionaire patron of the arts, compassionate philanthropist, champion of black economic empowerment, urbane raconteur and generous host. But within six months of his death, Kebble was exposed as the architect of one of the biggest and most convoluted frauds seen by any stock exchange in the world, a flawed genius who lied and cheated and stole so cunningly...

This is the book President Jacob Zuma does not want you to read. From Shaik to 'The Spear', award-winning investigative journalist Adriaan Basson reveals the truth behind Jacob Zuma's presidency of the ANC and South Africa. From one bad decision to another, this explosive, roller-coaster account traces the unravelling of a likeable but deeply flawed leader who came to power as victim, not visionary. Basson forensically unpacks the charges against Zuma and reveals a president whose first pr...

Where did we lose our idealism and why and at what cost?' In these conversations with people of a younger generation Mamphela Ramphele responds to the growing despair among young South Africans about the cracks that are appearing in our system of governance and threatening the idealism of the country that reinvented itself with the dawn of democracy in 1994. She shows incisively how successive post-apartheid ANC governments have betrayed the nation for a culture of impunity among those clo...

Max du Preez has one hell of a story to tell. In his career as a renegade reporter, he’s survived three dismissals, seven libel suits, thirteen criminal cases, four aeroplane crashes, a bombing, two assassination attempts and was a regular on right-wing hit lists. He was in Soweto on 16 June 1976, witnessed the debauched parties of apartheid cabinet ministers, and stepped over dead bodies in a bombed Angolan village. He looked into apartheid killer Dirk Coetzee’s eyes and published his sto...

Throughout his tenure as the first black Springbok coach, Peter de Villiers was in the news, and not always for the right reasons. His battle to be accepted and respected by the rugby fraternity started from the moment his appointment was announced, when his new boss admitted that De Villiers had got the job for reasons ‘other than only rugby’. In his four years as Bok coach, De Villiers experienced huge successes – a series win over the British & Irish Lions and a Tri Nations trophy – but...

A terrifying true story of greed, corruption, depravity and ruthless criminal enterprise … On the black markets of Southeast Asia, rhino horn is worth more than gold, cocaine and heroin. This is the chilling story of a more than two-year-long investigation into a dangerous criminal underworld where merciless syndicates will stop at nothing to attain their prize. It is a tale of greed, folly and corruption, and of an increasingly desperate battle to save the rhino – which has survived for m...

Every war has at least one - a unit so different, so daring, that it becomes the stuff of which legends are made and heroes are born. Among the South African forces fighting in Angola from 1975 to 1989, that unit was 32 Battalion. Founded in utmost secrecy from the vanquished remnants of a foreign rebel movement, undefeated in 12 years of front-line battle, feared by enemies that included both conventional Cuban armies and Namibian guerrilla fighters, the Buffalo Soldiers became the South ...